North Carolina is home to 58 community colleges — all institutions focused on meeting the unique demands of their service areas. However, in my more than 32 years serving the North Carolina Community College System, I have encountered no institution that addresses so thoroughly the health and fitness needs posed by a large, rural county as well as Brunswick Community College. Simply, no community college in North Carolina boasts a campus facility such as the Dinah E. Gore Fitness & Aquatics Center.

There are truly more holiday events in Brunswick County than we can cover in a single season. If there are so many we physically can’t get to them all, we’re certain the same is true for Beacon readers. But rest assured we try to cover as many as we can so as many readers as possible can take in the sights, too.

Based on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s seasonal forecast, Brunswick County is likely to have a drier and warmer winter than normal — the opposite of what we experienced last year.

If eyes are windows into the soul, then a cat’s whiskers are a telescope into their mind. If you learn to translate the subtle twitches and tucks of cat whiskers, you’ll be one step closer to understanding the feline world. A cat’s whiskers are important indicators of mood, danger detectors and built-in navigational system. What are your cat’s whiskers trying to tell you?

Holidays bring the warm feelings of family relationships renewed, twinkling lights, roasting chestnuts and wrapping paper torn asunder around an evergreen tree cloaked in memories of Christmases past. All that Norman Rockwell imagery may not work for you if you’ve just awakened from a tryptophan-induced coma with the television remote in one hand and the shrill musings of your in-laws reverberating through your gray matter.

Mindful. That’s a term we’ve been hearing more and more regarding lots of things in life, including healthful eating. Living (or eating) mindfully simply means paying attention to the events, activities and thoughts that make up your daily life instead of just operating on autopilot. Mindfulness is taking time to think about the choices you make and doing things on purpose.

James Finley’s statement about great religion and pain asks us to recognize “suffering as suffering and transform our suffering into mindfulness, compassion, peace, and liberation. … The teachings of the Buddha were not to escape from life, but to help us relate to ourselves and the world as thoroughly as possible.”

I’m guessing you’re either feeling ecstatic, excluded or exhausted — maybe a little of all three. Let’s just hope you don’t need to be exonerated!

Relax — this is all normal. It’s hard to manage your expectations when you’ve created a scenario right out of a Hallmark movie. On the other hand, you may have just been hoping to get through the holiday without a catastrophe.